How should we choose our civil servants? Who chooses them? What are the criteria to be employed? How should they be fired? Should not civil society and Parliament have a role to play? Should not the public be consulted?
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Blog , English , For Lawyers
The MACC quandary: Should stakeholders be consulted before public officials are appointed?
A great public uproar accompanied the sudden appointment of the MACC Chief. Behind the clamour lurks a Kraken of colossal importance: Should all national stakeholders have a say in the appointment of senior public servants? This is an educational moment. What will we do with it?
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Is the current method of selecting judges, transparent? Should it be? What can be done to improve it?
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Blog , English , For Lawyers
On the horns of a dilemma – will the Federal Court judges recuse themselves?
An unusual thing happened at the Federal Court on August 6, 2018. There is a history to this. You know it well. It concerns a company called 1MDB and the ex-PM Najib Razak. On March 23, 2016, Mahathir sued the then PM Najib Razak for ‘misfeasance in public office’. The High Court struck out the suit. The judge ruled that a prime minister was not a ‘public officer. The Court of ...
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Why are we mollycoddling our public figures? There is a weapon far deadlier than a nuclear bomb. Words are the most powerful weapons in all the world. So much so that a cautionary note penned in 1885 reads: - ‘Every word is endowed with a spirit … One word may be likened unto fire, another unto light, and the influence which both exert is manifest in the world.’ It has been said that a ...
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Who said the Prime Minister is not a public officer? Two separate panels of the Court of Appeal did. One panel heard Mahathir’s appeal. It delivered its decision in April of this year. The second panel of the Court of Appeal heard Tony Pua’s appeal and delivered its decision last week. Both Mahathir and Tony Pua had sued the then Prime Minister Najib for the tort of public misfeasance. Both lost. When they ...
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[Edited by S. Kamatchy and Suria Juan Pillai] In an article dated 13.07.2018, the ex-Chief Justice, Tun Abdul Hamid says that from 9:30 p.m. on July 11 up to midnight July 31, 2018 there are now two Chief Justices. Is he right? The long and short of all of this is… When the King accepted the resignations of the outgoing CJ and the PCA on 8 June 2018, their offices ceased. The King did ...
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You have seen the articles emerging from this blog since 09 May 2018 — or ‘5-0-9’ as I called the GE14 (the date of May 09th, 2018). There is a story behind these articles. Their production and timing were wholly accidental. In the years to come the people may become quiescent. They may, once again, feel re-assured behind their closed doors. But these issues filled the night of 5-0-9, like night-tracer shells from artillery. ...
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Is every vote of equal strength? Does every vote, cast at any part of the nation, possess the same effect? Let’s use the 2018 General Elections (GE-14) as an example. The Kapar parliamentary constituency [P109] represents one seat in parliament. The Putrajaya constituency [P125] also represents one seat. What is the difference? Kapar had, in GE-14, 124,983 voters. Putrajaya had 27,314 voters. So, comparing apple-to-apple, for a single parliamentary seat, Kapar had 4.6 times ...
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A recent spate of social media messages argue that the former prime minister Najib enjoys absolute immunity from criminal sanction. The messages refer to an article by Mr Charles Hector, entitled: ‘Najib – Cannot be charged for crimes as a public servant until law is changed?’ Now, did Charles say the former PM was immune from any criminal prosecution? In 2016, Tun Mahathir sued Najib. Mahathir alleged that there had been ...
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